Comment by dang

I brought up the "generic tangent" guideline because this was a case of how small/specific topics tend to get sucked into the gravity field of big/generic ones, leading to less interesting discussion (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).

Not only that but less-interesting discussion is usually more-indignant, which makes sense when discussion abandons the actual content of an article (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). So we end up losing along two axes: loss of information and rise of inflammation.